It is urgent to gather the stories and histories of heirloom seeds by all possible means: phone conversations, emails, letters and personal meetings. Seed Savers Exchange is in a race against time to contact the seed donors and their relatives so that their first-hand accounts are not lost. Read one such story of the "Aunt Molly Bean" here.
Read MoreJeannette Beranger and Alison Martin will be at the 2013 Seed Savers Exchange Conference and Campout representing the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. They will be teaching a workshop titled Evaluating a Poultry Flock for Breeding. We asked them to fill us in on what to expect from their workshop.
Backyard Chickens Are Back!
By Alison Martin, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy
Look around you: more than ever, chickens are showing up in back yards or being incorporated into sustainable farms. No matter the size of your flock, a question that comes up each year is “which of these chickens should I keep as breeders for next year?” Our workshop, Evaluating a Poultry Flock for Breeding, will give you the hands-on skills and knowledge to make those decisions.
For those of you who don’t know us, the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC) works with farmers to conserve heritage breeds of livestock and poultry. Like heirloom plants, America has lost many of the breeds that were important in times past. In fact, in 1976 organizers of a Bicentennial celebration at Old Sturbridge Village in New England had trouble finding animals that would have been on the farm in 1776. The more they thought about it, the more this bothered them, and together with concerned breeders and scientists, they formed the (then) American Minor Breeds Conservancy. In the 36 years since, we haven’t lost a breed!
Unlike Seed Savers Exchange, ALBC doesn’t sell animals. For one thing, they’re harder to gather and store than seeds! We do facilitate participatory conservation. Like Seed Savers Exchange, we help breeders network with each other so they can share and exchange breeding stock and best practices. Our Master Breeder project documents the wisdom of long-time breeders, and passes that along to new breeders. We have restored productivity to breeds that have been neglected, and brought other breeds back from the brink of extinction. All this and more conserves agricultural biodiversity and maintains options for farming.
The time is right for heritage poultry and livestock. Many have regional adaptations and history that fit right in with the local foods movement. Farmers are discovering that their hardiness and thrift make them a wonderful fit for small farms, and consumers who care where their food comes from are discovering the benefits of rich and diverse flavors. And heritage animals complement heirloom seeds well, as you’ve probably seen at Heritage Farm.
Jeannette and I are excited about our first visit to the SSE Conference and Campout. We want to meet with you and hear about your homesteads. And we want to share our experience – between us we have more than 50 years experience with poultry! This year we helped Seed Savers Exchange source some excellent Buckeye chickens, and that’s what we’ll be evaluating in the workshop. The birds selected as breeders will be banded, and at the end of the season they will go to the winner of the Mother Earth News Heritage Chicken Giveaway!
If you would like to learn more about Buckeye chickens, chicken assessment, or ALBC, check us out online at www.albc-usa.org. See you in Decorah!
Over the past several months I’ve identified 
with the Johnny Cash song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.” I’ve been speaking at seed guilds, seed libraries, seed banks, seed rallies, seed conferences and seed classes. But my audience hasn’t been limited to only seed enthusiasts and gardeners. I’ve found myself helping to restore the neglected bridge between seeds and food, culture, and society.
Recently I returned from speaking in Pennsylvania at a Slow Food Harrisburg Farm-to-Table dinner. For many Seed Savers Exchange supporters, the connection between Slow Food and heirloom seeds is clear. We need to preserve our food crop heritage for future generations, and seeds are a vital aspect of this task. You can see all the wonderful SSE seed varieties nominated to Slow Food’s Ark of Taste here.
Soon I’ll be leaving for Boulder, Colorado to speak at the Slow Money National Gathering. Slow Money describes itself as a new kind of investing concentrated on replacing an economy based on extraction and consumption with an economy based on preservation and restoration. Our mission at Seed Savers Exchange is similarly focused on preservation and restoration. Slow Money founder Woody Tasch explains: "For someone who knows what diversity means, knows how important it is, this is a form of economic diversity... Taking those same principles and not just doing it with your seeds, but doing it with where your capital is going, where your money is being invested."
From Slow Food to Slow Money, slow seeds may indeed be the critical link that holds this and so much more together in our world.
Our mission is to conserve and promote America's culturally diverse but endangered food crop heritage for future generations by collecting, growing, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants. www.seedsavers.org
“This apple comes from an old tree at my grandmother’s home, and it is the best apple I have ever tasted.” We hear this story a lot around here, and usually, the story ends like this: “Now the tree is dying, and nobody in the family remembers what variety it is.”
Well, there is only one thing to do, graft! Apples are propagated by grafting a part of the old tree, called scionwood, onto a new rootstock. Grafting is necessary because apple seed produces offspring unlike the parent plant. This propagation technique allows you to determine how large the tree will eventually grow – choose dwarfing rootstocks for a small backyard or a large pot on a patio, or graft onto a standard rootstock to grow a full-sized tree that will survive generations.
Join us and learn this ancient skill by attending one of SSE’s bench grafting workshops held on April 5 and April 12, 2014 (editors note: registration is now closed). Attendees will go home with three heritage apple varieties and the skills to start their own orchard. Workshops are led by Seed Savers Exchange orchard manager and apple historian Dan Bussey, who is nearing completion of his book documenting all of the named apple varieties grown in North America since the 1600s.
Listen to Dan Bussey's talk, "Our Apple Heritage," here.
View a short video introduction to apple grafting from Dan:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37KdQHL9koo[/youtube]
View a past SSE webinar on apple grafting here:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mujxy4MG8wA[/youtube]
With spring around the corner and a foot of snow still on the ground, the Seed Savers Exchange evaluation team has been evaluating dried legumes from last summer’s harvest. Beans, peas, and lima beans are soaked overnight and boiled until tender the next day. Cowpeas are not soaked, but are cooked the same. Once cooked, the evaluation team tastes each variety, taking notes on flavors and eliciting opinions from fellow lab staff. The following are some of the best flavored varieties grown in 2012:
SSE Collection: Bean 3461 ‘Alice Whitis’
These cooked dry beans were sweet with a smooth texture, excellent for baked beans. For fresh eating, the beans were easy to shell and had a meaty texture with a noticeable sweet flavor. While the pods were too fibrous to be enjoyed at the snap bean stage, this pole bean stood out as an all-around flavor winner for the 2012 growing season. John Inabnitt of Somerset, Kentucky donated this bean to SSE in 1992. Alice Whitis of Acorn, Kentucky gave the bean to John’s grandmother, and John’s aunt grew the bean after his grandmother died in the 1930s.
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SSE Collection: Pea 94 ‘Jump’
These cooked peas had a rich, meaty, slightly sweet flavor with a smooth texture. The peas kept the brown mottled colorings when cooked. When eaten fresh, they had a slightly sweet flavor, but tasted far superior when used as dried peas. In the garden, this plant was a vigorous grower and prolific producer. Dennis Miller listed this pea in the SSE Yearbook from 1986 to 1991. His great-grandfather, Bill Jump, originally grew this variety in eastern Washington in the mid-1930s.
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SSE Collection: Cowpea 16 ‘Swiss Gablie Bona’
This cowpea was slightly sweet, and had a good, firm texture. Jesse Yoakam donated the cowpea to SSE in 1988. His great-grandparents brought them from Switzerland many years ago. The English interpretation of the name is ‘Ladie Beans.’
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SSE Collection: Lima Bean 282 ‘Wick’s Lima’
This lima bean had good texture with a sweet flavor when cooked. When eaten fresh, the beans had a dense texture and subtle sweet flavor. This pretty lima bean was donated by Helen Thomas in 2004. Helen obtained the bean in the 1960s from her husband’s grandmother, Wick B. Smith, of Sandyville, West Virginia.
Interested in growing these legumes? By becoming a member of Seed Savers Exchange you can access these and hundreds of other varieties in our annual Yearbook. Find out more about becoming a member and supporting the preservation of our endangered food crop heritage here.
Untouchable by hurricanes, impervious to tectonic movement, protected by polar bears, and reachable only through methods worthy of reality television - the Svalbard Global Seed Vault provides the ultimate in long term storage for seed. On February 14th, Seed Savers Exchange sent its sixth shipment of seed to the vault, located on a remote archipelago in arctic Norway. This vault serves as a global gene bank for the world’s food crops, and will provide long-term back up for Seed Saver Exchange’s preservation collections. To date, Seed Savers Exchange has deposited a total of 2,248 unique varieties, and continues to deposit seeds of several hundred varieties every year.
To prepare the seeds for long-term storage, seeds are dried until they have approximately 5% moisture content, and are then heat sealed into air-tight packets. Once inside the vault, the packets will be kept at 0°F (-17°C) and will remain viable for a very long time. Similar to a safe deposit box at the bank, only Seed Savers Exchange has access to the materials deposited. This ‘Black Box’ agreement is made with each depositor, and ensures that only the depositor can access their own seeds in the vault.
The Svalbard seed vault was built deep into mountainous permafrost, which keeps the vault at below freezing temperatures even without a cooling system. Furthermore, its treacherous and remote location protects the vault from possible harm due to natural disasters and human powered calamities like a nuclear bomb strike. This kind of protection ensures Seed Savers Exchanges’ seeds will be safe for many years to come.
“As one of 1400 seed banks in the world, Seed Savers Exchange is proud to deposit an additional 366 varieties in the Svalbard Global Seed Bank in Norway, bringing our total deposits to more than 2,000 varieties. The global seed bank, with 725,000 total deposits, represents man’s best efforts to ensure that today's seed varieties are available for future generations.” – John Torgimson, Seed Savers Exchange president.
Read more about the genetic resources preservation efforts at Seed Savers Exchange here.
At 96 years of age, Theodore Meece was honored as Kentucky’s Oldest Worker. While a heart ailment caused by old age slowed the accomplished centennialist as he grew older, Theodore continued to work on his farm until passing away in 2006 at 105 years old.
Theodore Meece began life on September 3, 1901. Living on a farm, he learned the value of hard work from an early age. Theodore had his first job making 50 cents a day digging grubs out of the fields when 12 years old. In his teens, he traveled by himself to work the oil fields in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he also taught himself to drive. Theodore learned to read from his grandmother, and traveled great distances to complete high school – a noted accomplishment of his time.
In Theodore’s mid-twenties, he met his wife at a post office where young locals spent their time after work, and they settled down on her family’s land in Somerset, Kentucky.
Here he established a farm and taught in rural schools for 31 years. He often shared seeds and plants with neighbors, while sometimes eliciting friendly competition about the size and taste of various vegetables. Theodore shared a bean he called ‘Meece’, which was so popular locally that it was mentioned in his obituary.
Theodore first obtained his bean when he settled in Somerset from locals Idy and Minnie Snell. Minnie called it a ‘cornfield bean’ as locals often grew the variety on Hickory Cane corn. This corn variety would grow 12-14 feet tall, and the ears would be used for pickling and roasting whole. The bean was shared between neighbors and passed down through generations of the Snell family, where it is still grown by Minnie’s great-grandson, Gene, who calls it ‘Minnie’ bean in her honor.
Though Theodore has passed away, his legacy lives on in the story of the ‘Theodore Meece’ bean. John Inabnit donated the bean to Seed Savers Exchange with the following note:
“The Theodore Meece bean came from Theodore Meece of Poplarville, KY, just a few miles down the road from where I live. Mr. Meece is going to be 105 this year. Someone really needs to do a story on him. He is a retired school teacher, farmer, taught Sundy School for 75 years, remembers the 1st car, airplane in this area and is a real character. He kept his drivers license til he was 100.”
Theodore’s bean can be eaten as shelling beans, and have a good flavor and moist texture. The Snell family often pickled or dried fresh snap beans to use in the winter. The dried beans are oval and have a creamy tan grey-blushed base with an overlay of dark brown stripes and mottles.
Read more about our plant collections here.
Maintaining and distributing unique heirloom and open-pollinated seeds is the primary goal of the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) gene bank. The Evaluation Program is an important link between maintaining varieties at Heritage Farm and getting them into the hands of gardeners, chefs, and farmers.
The Evaluation Program, which is only three years old, was started with the financial support from people like you. The program allows us to collect data on a variety’s traits throughout its life cycle. This data includes characteristics such as plant height, flower color, days to maturity, and fruit size.
The program also evaluates culinary usage—incredibly important in a world of unsustainable eating and forgotten food cultures. Modern fruits and vegetables bred for shipping and uniformity lack the diversity seen in heirloom varieties—like beets, potatoes, cabbages, and apples that store for months in a root cellar; horticultural beans harvested between the snap and dry bean phases for their higher protein content; and melons best suited for baking. The forgotten traits in these varieties are the building blocks to a sustainable food system.
The information collected through the evaluation program serves several purposes. It allows us to:
For the first time ever, Seed Savers Exchange is offering a collection of varieties ‘From the Preservation Gardens’ in our catalog this year. These varieties were selected because of their interesting histories, unique characteristics, and popularity with staff—a direct result of the Evaluation Program.
A tax-deductible donation to Seed Savers Exchange will help us continue to maintain genetic diversity through projects like the Evaluation Program. Support our effort by making a donation or becoming a member online today, or call us at (563) 382-5990 (M-F, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm Central Time).
Thank you for your support,
John Torgrimson Executive Director
P.S. Donate $150 or more before December 31, 2012 and receive a free Seed Savers Exchange 2013 Calendar, which offers a beautiful glimpse of nature's seed bounty at Heritage Farm near Decorah, Iowa, where every seed has a story to tell.
Eating beans from the pod, when the beans are fully expanded but not yet dry, is becoming a lost culinary tradition in America. The plump, wet, beans do not store well, and they are difficult to shell mechanically because the tender beans cannot tolerate rough handling. For these reasons, shelling beans have been shunned by industrial agriculture. However, the flavor is rich and shelling beans are richer in nutrients than dry beans. We added a horticultural bean taste test to our 2012 bean evaluation and found that most beans taste good as shelling beans, and some taste really good! Many that performed well in our taste test were not necessarily known as shelling beans historically. For example, “Bessie” (Bean 6042) has been passed down maternally in Frances Sullivan’s family for over a century, each generation using it primarily as a green bean for fresh eating and canning.
This variety really caught our attention in the 2012 taste test. We described it as having “excellent robust flavor, sweet and slightly tart, low-medium acidity, firm and meaty texture but still juicy, great as a slicing tomato.” Curious about the variety, we investigated its history and discovered that it is mis-named in our collection and should be called “Djena Lee’s Golden Girl.” We are not the first to notice its outstanding flavor. It is promoted by Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste, and won the Chicago Fair’s taste test 10 years in a row in the 1920s and 1930s. Though historically, women played a central role in developing and improving varieties in America’s gardens, Djena Lee was one of the few female plant breeders who enjoyed recognition for her efforts in early 20th century America.
Most kohlrabi reach market maturity in 50-60 days and quickly become woody if left in the field. For that reason, we complete our market mature evaluation at 60 days. One variety in our evaluation grow-out, ‘Giant Czechoslovakian,’ did not form a kohlrabi head at 60 days. We thought it did not care for the spring weather. But in our fall grow-out of the same varieties, it again produced no stem-swelling at 60 days. We began to question whether it was really a kohlrabi, or if our seed-stock was compromised by crossing with another Brassica oleracea. We researched similarly named varieties in commercial catalogs, promoted as a 130 day maturity kohlrabi that does not get woody even when large. Then we went back to the long-forgotten spring planting and found enormous kohlrabis! Harvested at 176 days, they tasted great!
This squash’s oblong shape, size, and dark green mature color make it look somewhat like a cucumber. A staff favorite as a winter squash, this year we evaluated this pepo squash as a summer squash as well. To our surprise, ‘Dostal’ turned out to be a favorite 2012 summer squash - with its dense flesh and mildly sweet flavor. It went on to win accolades again in the 2012 winter squash taste evaluation for its buttery, smooth texture and complex, rich flavor. ‘Dostal’ has proven that we cannot make assumptions about the versatile varieties in our collection based on the limitations of more modern, highly specialized varieties.
Each year, hundreds of gardeners from all corners of the world share heirloom vegetable and fruit varieties they’ve collected from their own backyards.
Within Seed Savers Exchange they’re known as Listed Members, the core of our seed exchange and the source of more than 10,000 varieties that are listed in our annual Yearbook. To other SSE members, they’re often known individually by their listed member code (IL CR R).
Each month, we’ll be profiling one of our listed members in order to give our audience a closer look at some of the individuals responsible for preserving America’s endangered garden heritage.
I had the opportunity to interview Russ Crow in the spring of 2012. Russ was a part of Seed Savers Exchange back when the organization was just getting started in the mid-1970’s. Though he took a break from gardening in the 90s, Russ has since returned to one of his horticultural passions—beans—and currently serves as an important informational resource to our seed historian.
The following audio clips describe Russ’s discovery and subsequent stabilization of a new bean variety discovered in his garden in 1977, as well as his initial forays into seed saving and the reason he continues saving seeds himself.
Blue Jay bean (Russ Crow audio) [audio: http://blog.seedsavers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/russcrowbluejay.mp3|titles=Russ Crow - Blue Jay Bean]
How I Started Saving Seeds (Russ Crow audio) [audio: http://blog.seedsavers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/russcrowhowistartedseedsaving.mp3|titles=Russ Crow - How I Started Saving Seeds]
To learn how to access the largest heirloom seed catalog in the world and browse over 12,000 listings from Russ and hundreds of other members, visit seedsavers.org.
Each year at Heritage Farm we grow a portion of our collection—family heirlooms passed down generationally and given to Seed Savers Exchange for safekeeping.
Part of the responsibility that comes with maintaining this unique collection of fruit and vegetable varieties is understanding as much as we can about each one. To gain this understanding, every summer—in addition to growing varieties that are in need of refreshed or increased stock—we also grow a portion of our collection for evaluation purposes.
This year we are growing more than 400 varieties of heirloom seed in our evaluation gardens—from amaranth to watermelon—with beet, carrot, celery, collard, corn, cowpea, cucumber, eggplant, kale, kohlrabi, leek, lettuce, lima, melon, mustard, okra, pea, pepper, radish, rutabaga, squash, Swiss chard, tomato, and turnip in between.
The evaluation crew spends their summer documenting and describing each variety we grow. The crew collects data on traits such as plant height, flower color, days to maturity, and fruit size, to name a few. We also evaluate how a variety might do in the marketplace, considering taste and culinary usage. For example, this year we are evaluating 40 varieties of beans and will classify them as snap beans, shelling beans, or dry beans.
Evaluation data not only helps us make informed collection management decisions, it also gives us the information we need to write detailed plant descriptions. Plant descriptions are key to promoting our collection in the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook and other publications, increasing the distribution of collection varieties to our members’ gardens and bringing more active participants into our preservation efforts. It is our hope to see more and more of our collection being grown, enjoyed, and preserved in gardens across the country.
We are one of the few organizations doing this important work with heirlooms. And with thousands of varieties in our collection, this is work we do each summer, year after year.
A tax-deductible donation to Seed Savers Exchange will help us continue to maintain genetic diversity through projects like the evaluation program. Support our effort by making a donation or becoming a member online today, or call us at (563) 382-5990 (M-F, 8:30 am - 5:30 pm Central Time).
Thank you for helping us maintain these heirloom varieties for future generations to come.
John Torgrimson Diane Ott Whealy Executive Director Co-founder and Vice President
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Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization, with a mission to conserve and promote America's culturally diverse but endangered garden and food crop heritage for future generations by collecting, growing, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants.
Seed Savers Exchange is a nonprofit, member supported organization that collects, preserves and shares heirloom seeds for our future. Since 1975, SSE and our supporters have collected the seeds and stories that would otherwise have been lost.
Seed Savers Exchange is a tax-exempt 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of heirloom seeds.
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